On November 28, 2017 in Gatineau, Destination Canada held its 17th Annual Public Meeting in advance of the Tourism Industry Association of Canada National Congress.
Our Board Chair, Ben Cowan-Dewar, opened proceedings with an overview of the 2016 annual report, including a highlights video.
President and CEO David F. Goldstein then took the stage and gave a detailed presentation including updates on performance in Destination Canada’s key international markets.
And the numbers are great: as of September 2017, Canada is seeing a 7% increase in arrivals, year-over-year, with arrivals from China growing by 11% and those from Mexico growing by 52%. Considering these trends, we expect to see the best ever year for the Canadian tourism industry when our year end numbers are available in February. For more information on this year’s tourism successes, see our tourism reports.
David also highlighted two key opportunities. The Connecting America program, aims to bring an additional 1.035M travellers to Canada, spending $629M, and is already seeing incredible results. The Canada-China Year of Tourism 2018 also presents a great opportunity, as our second largest overseas market, more than 10 million Chinese long-haul pleasure travellers intend on visiting Canada in the next two years.
Though we have seen significant success across the industry, we’re continuing to deepen our collaborative partnerships as we strive for long term success of the tourism industry.
Two strategic partnerships were announced at the Annual Public Meeting reaffirming our commitment to work closely with our partners to grow the Canadian tourism industry:
Statistics Canada
We’ve been working on improving the financial data available to the tourism industry about what travellers are spending in Canada, what they’re spending it on and where they’re spending. At the MOU signing at our Annual Public Meeting, Statistics Canada committed to helping us make this a reality by helping us analyze and share financial data for the benefit of our tourism industry.
NorthStar 22
Our industry partners have been working with us on our five year NorthStar 22 vision. We’ve taken these learnings and re-framed them as prospectuses—summarizing the nature and terms of our collaboration with 21 of our key industry partners who signed an MOU at our Annual Public Meeting, committing to this collective path forward.
Download the presentation from our Annual Public Meeting.
Posted: November 28, 2017
